United States

Chatbots based on large language models offer cheap conversation practice opportunities for language learners. However, they are hard to control for linguistic forms that correspond to learners&#39; current needs, such as grammar. We control grammar in chatbot conversation practice by grounding a dialogue response generation model in a pedagogical repository of grammar skills. We also explore how this control helps learners to produce specific grammar. We comprehensively evaluate prompting, fine-tuning, and decoding strategies for grammar-controlled dialogue response generation. Strategically decoding Llama3 outperforms GPT-3.5 when tolerating minor response quality losses. Our simulation predicts grammar-controlled responses to support grammar acquisition adapted to learner proficiency. Existing language learning chatbots and research on second language acquisition benefit from these affordances. Code available on GitHub.

NAACL 2025

Grammar Control in Dialogue Response Generation for Language Learning Chatbots

grammar and knowledge-based approaches

educational applications

automatic evaluation

dialogue

## Welcome to 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics!
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The University of Texas at Austin 
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NAACL 2024

2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Chatbots based on large language models offer cheap conversation practice opportunities for language learners. However, they are hard to control for linguistic forms that correspond to learners' current needs, such as grammar. We control grammar in chatbot conversation practice by grounding a dialogue response generation model in a pedagogical repository of grammar skills. We also explore how this control helps learners to produce specific grammar. We comprehensively evaluate prompting, fine-tuning, and decoding strategies for grammar-controlled dialogue response generation. Strategically decoding Llama3 outperforms GPT-3.5 when tolerating minor response quality losses. Our simulation predicts grammar-controlled responses to support grammar acquisition adapted to learner proficiency. Existing language learning chatbots and research on second language acquisition benefit from these affordances. Code available on GitHub.

poster

### Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Welcome to the 2025 meeting of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics! I am proud to help organize the first NAACL conference to carry the new name of our organization, one that emphasizes inclusion for all of the Americas. I am also pleased to welcome you to Albuquerque, New Mexico, a state whose unique blend of cultural influences will make for an excellent backdrop for NAACL 2025, especially with this year’s special theme on NLP in a Multicultural World. 
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Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Ambiguity is a linguistic tool for encoding information efficiently, yet it also causes misunderstandings and disagreements. It is particularly relevant to the domain of misinformation, as fact-checking ambiguous claims is difficult even for experts. In this paper we argue that instead of predicting a veracity label for which there is genuine disagreement, it would be more beneficial to explain the ambiguity. Thus, this work introduces claim disambiguation, a constrained generation task, for explaining ambiguous claims in fact-checking. This involves editing them to spell out an interpretation that can then be unequivocally supported by the given evidence. We collect a dataset of 1501 such claim revisions and conduct experiments with sequence-to-sequence models. The performance is compared to a simple copy baseline and a Large Language Model baseline. The best results are achieved by employing Minimum Bayes Decoding, with a BertScore F1 of 92.22. According to human evaluation, the model successfully disambiguates the claims 72% of the time.

Dis2Dis: Explaining Ambiguity in Fact-Checking

This paper studies the problem of dynamical system modeling, which involves the evolution of multiple interacting objects. Recent data-driven methods often utilize graph neural networks (GNNs) to learn these interactions by optimizing the neural network in an end-to-end fashion. While large language models (LLMs) have shown exceptional zero-shot performance across various applications, their potential for modeling dynamical systems has not been extensively explored. In this work, we design prompting techniques for dynamical system modeling and systematically evaluate the capabilities of LLMs on two tasks, including dynamic forecasting and relational reasoning. An extensive benchmark LLM4DS across nine datasets is built for performance comparison. Our extensive experiments yield several key findings: (1) LLMs demonstrate competitive performance without training compared to state-of-the-art methods in dynamical system modeling. (2) LLMs effectively infer complex interactions among objects to capture system evolution. (3) Prompt engineering plays a crucial role in enabling LLMs to accurately understand and predict the evolution of systems.

How Do Large Language Models Perform in Dynamical System Modeling

Fact-checking long-form text is challenging, and it is therefore common practice to break it down into multiple atomic claims. The typical approach to fact-checking these atomic claims involves retrieving a fixed number of pieces of evidence, followed by a verification step. However, this method is usually not cost-effective, as it underutilizes the verification model's internal knowledge of the claim and fails to replicate the iterative reasoning process in human search strategies. To address these limitations, we propose FIRE, a novel agent-based framework that integrates evidence retrieval and claim verification in an iterative manner. Specifically, FIRE employs a unified mechanism to decide whether to provide a final answer or generate a subsequent search query, based on its confidence in the current judgment. We compare FIRE with other strong fact-checking frameworks and find that it achieves slightly better performance while reducing large language model (LLM) costs by an average of 7.6 times and search costs by 16.5 times. These results indicate that FIRE holds promise for application in large-scale fact-checking operations.

FIRE: Fact-checking with Iterative Retrieval and Verification

The recently introduced Mojo programming language (PL) by Modular, has received significant attention in the scientific community due to its claimed significant speed boost over Python. Despite advancements in code Large Language Models (LLMs) across various PLs, Mojo remains unexplored in this context. To address this gap, we introduce MojoBench, the first framework for Mojo code generation. MojoBench includes HumanEval-Mojo, a benchmark dataset designed for evaluating code LLMs on Mojo, and Mojo-Coder, the first LLM pretrained and finetuned for Mojo code generation, which supports instructions in 5 natural languages (NLs). Our results show that Mojo-Coder achieves a 30-35% performance improvement over leading models like GPT-4o and Claude-3.5-Sonnet. Furthermore, we provide insights into LLM behavior with underrepresented and unseen PLs, offering potential strategies for enhancing model adaptability. MojoBench contributes to our understanding of LLM capabilities and limitations in emerging programming paradigms fostering more robust code generation systems.

MojoBench: Language Modeling and Benchmarks for Mojo

Membership inference attacks (MIA) attempt to verify the membership of a given data sample in the training set for a model. MIA has become relevant in recent years, following the rapid development of large language models (LLM). Many are concerned about the usage of copyrighted materials for training them and call for methods for detecting such usage. However, recent research has largely concluded that current MIA methods do not work on LLMs. Even when they seem to work, it is usually because of the ill-designed experimental setup where other shortcut features enable ''cheating.'' In this work, we argue that MIA still works on LLMs, but only when multiple documents are presented for testing. We construct new benchmarks that measure the MIA performances at a continuous scale of data samples, from sentences (n-grams) to a collection of documents (multiple chunks of tokens). To validate the efficacy of current MIA approaches at greater scales, we adapt a recent work on Dataset Inference (DI) for the task of binary membership detection that aggregates paragraph-level MIA features to enable document- and dataset-level MIA. This baseline achieves the first successful MIA on pre-trained and fine-tuned LLMs.

Scaling Up Membership Inference: When and How Attacks Succeed on Large Language Models

Question Answering (QA) is an important part of tasks like text classification through information gathering. These are finding increasing use in sectors like healthcare, customer support, legal services, etc., to collect and classify responses into actionable categories. LLMs, although can support QA systems, they face a significant challenge of insufficient or missing information for classification. Although LLMs excel in reasoning, the models rely on their parametric knowledge to answer. However, questioning the user requires domain-specific information aiding to collect accurate information. Our work, GUIDEQ, presents a novel framework for asking guided questions to further progress a partial information. We leverage the explainability derived from the classifier model along with LLMs to ask guided questions, further enhancing the information. This further information helps in more accurate classification of a text. GUIDEQ derives the most significant key-words representative of a label using occlusions. We develop GUIDEQ’s prompting strategy for guided questions based on the top-3 classifier label outputs and the significant words, to seek specific and relevant information, and classify in a targeted manner. Through our experimental results, we demonstrate that GUIDEQ outperforms other LLMbased baselines, yielding improved F1-Score through the accurate collection of relevant further information. We perform various analytical studies and also report better question quality compared to our method.

GuideQ: Framework for Guided Questioning for progressive informational collection and classification

Despite active research on Automated Essay Scoring (AES), there is a noticeable scarcity of studies focusing on predicting creativity scores for essays. In this study, we develop a new essay rubric specifically designed for assessing creativity in essays. Leveraging this rubric, we construct ground truth data consisting of 5,048 essays. Furthermore, we propose a novel self-supervised learning model that recognizes cluster patterns within the essay embedding space and leverages them for creativity scoring. This approach aims to automatically generate a high-quality training set, thereby facilitating the training of diverse language models. Our experimental findings indicated a substantial enhancement in the assessment of essay creativity, demonstrating an increase in F1-score up to 58% compared to the primary state-of-the-art models across the ASAP and AIHUB datasets.

Representation-to-Creativity (R2C): Automated Holistic Scoring Model for Essay Creativity

With the rapid growth of Large Language Models (LLMs), safeguarding textual content against unauthorized use is crucial. Watermarking offers a vital solution, protecting both - LLM-generated and plain text sources. This paper presents a unified overview of different perspectives behind designing watermarking techniques through a comprehensive survey of the research literature. Our work has two key advantages: (1) We analyze research based on the specific intentions behind different watermarking techniques, evaluation datasets used, and watermarking addition and removal methods to construct a cohesive taxonomy. (2) We highlight the gaps and open challenges in text watermarking to promote research protecting text authorship. This extensive coverage and detailed analysis sets our work apart, outlining the evolving landscape of text watermarking in Language Models.

From Intentions to Techniques: A Comprehensive Taxonomy and Challenges in Text Watermarking for Large Language Models

Code-LLMs, LLMs pre-trained on large code corpora, have shown great progress in learning rich representations of the structure and syntax of code, successfully using it to generate or classify code fragments. At the same time, understanding if they are able to do so because they capture code semantics, and how well, is still an open question. In this paper, we tackle this problem by introducing SeqCoBench, a benchmark for systematically assessing how Code-LLMs can capture code functional equivalence. SeqCoBench contains over 20 code transformations that either preserve or alter the semantics of Python programs. We conduct extensive evaluations in different settings, including zero-shot and parameter-efficient finetuning methods on state-of-the-art (Code)-LLMs to see if they can discern semantically equivalent or different pairs of programs in SeqCoBench. We find that the performance gap between these LLMs and classical match-based retrieval scores is minimal, with both approaches showing a concerning lack of depth in understanding code semantics.

What can Large Language Models Capture about Code Functional Equivalence?

The rapid evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) presents a promising solution to the global shortage of mental health professionals. However, their alignment with essential counseling competencies remains underexplored. We introduce CounselingBench, a novel NCMHCE-based benchmark evaluating 22 general-purpose and medical-finetuned LLMs across five key competencies. While frontier models surpass minimum aptitude thresholds, they fall short of expert-level performance, excelling in Intake, Assessment & Diagnosis but struggling with Core Counseling Attributes and Professional Practice & Ethics. Surprisingly, medical LLMs do not outperform generalist models in accuracy, though they provide slightly better justifications while making more context-related errors. These findings highlight the challenges of developing AI for mental health counseling, particularly in competencies requiring empathy and nuanced reasoning. Our results underscore the need for specialized, fine-tuned models aligned with core mental health counseling competencies and supported by human oversight before real-world deployment. Code and data associated with this manuscript can be found at: https://github.com/cuongnguyenx/CounselingBench

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Dis2Dis: Explaining Ambiguity in Fact-Checking

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